How I Fixed Atari’s Awful Music
And Got Over My Fear of Out-of-Tune Game Toons
When I first saw the Atari 2600 and played a few of the early games, one of the things that stood out to me was just how bad it sounded when a game attempted to play music.
Before I started developing for the machine, as a consumer, I never questioned why it sounded so bad; I just knew that the music was terrible. Clearly, no one at Atari had come to what I thought was the obvious conclusion that, if it’s a choice between out-of-tune music, or no music, no music is preferable. Put another way, for God’s sake, if it’s going to sound like caca, don’t even include it.
When I eventually started making games for the Atari system (1979/1980), I learned that the TIA chip in the system, which was a multi-function custom chip, was responsible for reading the inputs, handling the screen display, and generating audio. It had a lot on its plate. Further investigation determined that the TIA was “limited” in its ability to generate musical notes; “limited” meaning, it couldn’t do it.
In all fairness, at the time of the Atari 2600 (mid-1970’s), integrated circuits were relatively expensive to make. The more complex the circuitry, the more expensive the per-unit cost of the chip was. Therefore, to keep the complexity down, the designers of the TIA chip…